Dish Network recently announced a very cool new DVR called The Hopper.Your DVR may have the ability to jump ahead 30 seconds and allow you to skip through commercials fairly quickly, but the Hopper can do away with them completely.Its functionality is a bit limited at the moment – it only works for the major networks and it doesn't work until 24 hours after the program airs.Once it does though, you simply have to make sure the commercial skipping feature is enabled, then sit back and enjoy.

As you might imagine, not everyone is okay with this.Fox, NBC and CBS are all suing to shut the Hopper down, insisting that skipping commercials automatically is a violation of copyright law.Dish is as mystified as we are about how skipping commercials is a copyright issue.Dave Schull, Senior VP at Dish, says that the big three are anti-consumer and asks "will the networks next ask consumers to stop changing channels?"We'll see how this plays out, but either way it should set an interesting precedent.